It's not quite on the same order, but I've been listening to bad old Canadian 80's metal and now my YouTube sidebar has "HOW TO BE ALPHA ALL THE TIME - by BroScienceLife - Recommended For You" in the sidebar. looooooooooool

So car insurance is horrible and high priced in Ontario, which maybe I've mentioned before. It's the reason I don't own a car (I was once offered a FREE CAR, albeit one in need of about a grand worth of repairs and turned it down because it would have cost me thousands in insurance and parking just rusting away in my spot).

So a guy I know called his insurance company to complain after his rates jumped way up for no reason (which happens a lot - the reasons usually turn out to be spurious, like "We like your brand of car less now" or "We asked the government control board to allow us to have a double rate increase because reasons").

His insurance broker told him - with a straight face - that he could save money buy buying an entire second car, insuring it, and then applying for the multi-vehicle discount. WOO-HAA

Most of the time when greeted with some motherfucker with an accent saying "I work for Microsoft tech department" I reply "sure you do" and hang up.

My other plan would be to maybe to string them along while being totally retarded with a fake Texas accent.

Have done this with SEO company fishing emails. Got them to the point of trying to walk me through visiting "the Googles" using a phone. They asked whether I had an iPhone or an Android [sic]. I guess "What the hell does a robot have to do with phones?" gave away that I was stringing them along.

Last time I got one, it was a lady. I asked if she spoke French, she didn't. She asked if I spoke English. ("A leetle.") I told her she had a nice voice, asked where she was from. ("New York." Nice try.) She hung up when I asked her to sing for me. If she hadn't, I think I'd have sung for her.

Hey, if nothing else, it's good practice for talking to women. Even if I say something horrible by accident, she's a criminal trying to rob me, so who cares?

For months now, every couple weeks I'm getting a call from "EcoPlan" asking me if I own or rent my home. I'm on the no-call list so that's already BS right out of the gate. The first several times I said "I rent", they said "sorry to bother you, this program is only for owners", I said "take me off your list, you jackasses called me many times already, and you're not allowed to contact me in the first place" and they said "sure".

Second-to-last time they called, I said I owned my home. They explained that they were offering some sort of help to pay heating costs in the winter. I asked if they were with the government, with Hydro-Québec (our nationalized power company), or some private company. They didn't seem to understand the question at first, and when I insisted on asking them, they hung up. So the tiny odds that this was just some scuzzy-but-technically-legit corporation are out the window, these guys are obviously outright scammers.

I got another call from them today. The lady on the other side clearly had no idea they had contacted me before. I said I was a homeowner, answered a couple very very basic questions about the heating in my home, and when she asked me how much I paid in a year for heating I said "about 1200$", which is completely made-up. But then she actually told me that my costs were too low to qualify for their aid program, and that I could only benefit from their help if I paid more than 1800$ a year for heating. She apologized for bothering me, wished me a good day, and we ended the call politely like civilized people.

On one hand they're clearly scammers anyway. But... still... what? Do they only scam people with high heating costs? Did that lady calculate that I was too poor to steal from? This doesn't make a lick of sense. I'm actually kinda looking forward to their next call so I can tell them I pay 2500$ a year and see where the rabbit hole goes. It's starting to feel like a conversation in an adventure game where I'm picking my way through branching dialog paths and starting over from scratch every time I reach a dead end. The goal is either figuring out what's going on, or no longer getting these dumb calls.

I got another scammer call just now but it was just the regular "HELLO THIS IS TECHNICAL DEPARTMENT SOMETING IS WRONG WITH YUOR WINDOWS COMPUTAR" nonsense. I was so disappointed it wasn't my mystery assholes that I immediately hung up without messing with 'em. My heart's just not in it without the thrill of intrigue anymore.

Fuckers called again, pretending to be an insurance company this time, but it was the same "are you a homeowner" nonsense. Unfortunately I was cooking something and didn't have time to mess around so I just yelled incomprehensibly at the top of my lungs and hung up. That said, if they're doing it several times a day now it's not like I won't have another chance to dig deeper.